Tactic 7/90: Continually Define Culture

Culture can often seem like a nebulous, ephemeral concept; difficult to describe and impossible to see, however it's very possible to make culture tangible, codified and understood across your organization.

I've borrowed many of the images and ideas from "Culture with Brian Chesky and Alfred Lin (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 10)".

When we started GrowthGenius, we understood culture's importance and spent a good deal of time defining our values, assumptions and beliefs. We instinctively knew defining culture was important and if we didn't define it early on, it could take on its own dangerous direction.

In taking Ghandi's words below to heart, we attempted to turn out thoughts into words and words into actions.

Initially the company had a well-defined culture and benefited from much of the below.

We approached the problem, sales development, from first principles - organizing the best practices, tools and team we could, unencumbered by the norms and expectations of the industry.

As a small team, we were incredibly aligned on what we were trying to achieve.

We were stable, trusted each other, knew who belonged on the team and were able to keep the right people.

We were off to a great start.

We had very strong performance, growing from 4 to ~30 in 18 months - incredible revenue and people growth for a young company.

But as we strove to grow quickly, we sacrificed our values for intelligence, work ethic and technical fit. We brought on team members that didn't embody our original values and it caused friction, discomfort and underperformance across the team. We were forced to revisit our core values and reorganize the team in accordance with what was and still is incredibly important to the right team members.

The experience of bringing the wrong people on the team has been painful enough to revisit and redefine GrowthGenius' culture from the ground up. We've found it incredibly important to revisit our culture every 6 - 12 months to embody the spirit of the team, not just the leaders. They need polish, and a slight re-wording, but below are some of my personal values in an effort to start the conversation about GrowthGenius' new values.

1. Sincerely Generous - Not only does it feel great, but we believe sincere generosity is the quickest way to success.
2. Fearlessly Experimental - We embrace calculated risk and celebrate both success & failure.
3. Humble - No one likes those who brag unfoundedly. We have a short fuse for those who take credit for other's' work or more than they deserve.
4. Window-Like Transparency - We believe light is the quickest way to truth and improvement. If you have nothing to hide, don't hide anything.
5. Voracious Appetite For Knowledge - We devote enormous resources to making sure we are continuously learning and growing as people, leaders and team members.
6. Data-Driven - An argument without the data to back it up is like a house of cards, it doesn't belong stood up in the first place.
7. Positive & Fun - Our goal is to make work as fun as humanly possible, because we believe work can be as fun as play. How else is one supposed to do great work.
8. Diverse in Thought - Great ideas are like diamonds, they formed from the pressure of multiple perspectives.
9. Cautiously Optimistic - We change “No” to “not yet” or “how can we make it happen?” as fortune favours the hopeful and confident.
10. Autonomy - Give those around you clear objectives and enough room to define their path.
11. Mastery - I aim to become the best at whatever task I'm given, and expect the same of those around me. Always pursue a deep understanding of all the of underlying components of a role.
12. Purpose - 70% of our waking life is spent working; without purpose we are but rudderless, apathetic boats adrift at sea. There could be no worse fate than spending most of ones life without meaning.

Our mission is to:

"Help small businesses with great products and services succeed by enabling them to better connect with their customers."

We love and support the underdog as we believe great things can happen when you give those with ambition a chance. We choose carefully as having an opinion is more important than just doing good work, as we don't want to accelerate the proliferation of subpar products and services. We believe that it is our job to be a filter for those that should succeed, and when we choose a company to support, we do so with a great deal of hard work, sweat and tears.

As we work through our core values as a team, we are taking the following elements of high performing teams into consideration.

We don't plan on shying away from conflict as long as we've established clear responsibilities and trust that our team members will execute on their pieces of the plan. As we define our values, we'll make sure to continue to hire, fire, promote and demote based on this shared set of ideas.